Mitchell Robinson teaches music education at Michigan State University. He read Elizabeth Green’s fawning article about Eva Zmoskowitz and her Success Academy charter chain, and he blew a gasket.
He is equally mad at Green and Moskowitz for reasons you will understand if you read his post.
Basucally, he is furious that two non-educators are touting a model that can never be “scaled up” because it depends on culling students.
He writes:
“I’m still trying to understand what’s so “innovative” about Ms. Moskowitz’s approach to teaching. Is it innovative for your “model teachers” to scream at little kids when they act like…little kids? Is it innovative to expel more students of color than your neighborhood public schools do? Is it innovative to be against “poor kids…get(ting) medical, nutritional and other services at school“? I’m struggling with how anyone, including Ms. Green, could consider Eva Moskowitz’s approach at Success Academy to be innovative–but then, I’ve only been teaching for 37 years, and attended a state university for my undergraduate degree in education.
“I am beyond tired—beyond exhausted, really—of persons who have never taught anyone anything lecturing the rest of us who have about what we are doing wrong, how stupid we are, how lazy we are, and how they know better than we do when it comes to everything about teaching and learning. How about this, Eva and Elizabeth?–instead of pontificating about things you are equally arrogant and ignorant of, why don’t you each go back to school, get an education degree, or two, or three, get certified, do an internship (for free–in fact, pay a bunch of money to do so), or two, or three, then see if you can find a job in a school. Then, teach.I don’t care what you teach; what grade level; what subject. But stick it out for at least a school year. Write your lesson plans. Grade your papers and projects. Go to all of those grade level meetings, and IEP meetings, and school board meetings, and budget negotiation meetings, and union meetings, and curriculum revision meetings, and curriculum re-revision meetings, and teacher evaluation meetings, and “special area” meetings, and state department of education meetings, and professional development in-services, and parent-teacher conferences, and open houses, and attend all those concerts, and football games, and dance recitals, and basketball games, and soccer matches, and lacrosse games, and honor band concerts, and school musicals, and tennis matches, and plays, and debates, and quiz bowl competitions, and marching band shows, and cheerleading competitions, and swim meets.Then do it all 10, or 20, or 30 more times, and let me know how you feel about someone who never did ANY of these things, even for a “few lessons“, telling you how stupid, and lazy you are, and how you’re being a “defender of the status quo” if you’re not really excited to immediately implement their “radical, disruptive” ideas about how to “save public education.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Why I Left Teaching In A High Poverty District I have been a teacher for nearly nearly thirty years, with the last 21 in a industrial suburb of Detroit.This month I quit. Like many teachers over the past two decades, I have been disheartened by the “reforms” that have regimented education in ways that try to wring every last bit of joy out of learning in the school environment. The most pernicious of these reforms has been the federal requirement of annual high stakes testing. Children, teachers,schools, and even teacher training programs are judged by these tests even though there are decades of research that demonstrate that they are invalid measures. This, coupled with the relentless demonization of public schools has left students stressed out and driven many good people from the teaching profession. It has also driven enrollment in teacher education programs down by 50%. At the state level the assault on education has been just as vociferous. The elimination of seniority, the weakening of tenure, the prohibition on Districts from collecting union dues have left teachers in a much weakened position and helped drive down wages while leaving us vulnerable to capricious administrators if we spoke up for students. We now spend too much time constructing data walls to justify our jobs and not enough time building the relationship necessary to inspire students. We are consistently told we are failures and that even though we have committed our professional lives to serving our neediest children, that it is others such as administrators, politicians, the school privatization companies, and their billionaire backers who are the ones who truly care about children. At our local level, the teachers gave up 15% of our salaries in 2011 to close a projected $4.3 budget deficit. Even though it was administration that created the deficit, we had to solve it, while they continued to take wage increases. Teachers have still recouped only 8% of that 15% concession. Teachers are earning less than they did eleven years ago. If you take into account the 20% we now pay toward medical insurance, and the increased employee contribution toward our pension system, we earn less than what we did fifteen years ago. If you adjust for inflation, it is even more depressing. Nevertheless, we still enjoyed teaching and were proud that we had saved the District from the destruction that befell Highland Park and Inkster. The final straw for me, however, were the spending decisions made since we emerged from deficit. According to the 2016-2017 budget, we had a $4.6 million surplus. We foolishly thought that would mean that money would be spent in the classroom and improving our old infrastructure. The water in the building I worked in for the last seven years has an odor, taste and color about which the students rightfully complain. When a DEQ representative called the District office after we made a complaint about the water, she was told “We know the water is orange, that’s why we don’t drink it.” (The adult don’t drink it, but the kids certainly do.) There was also a bucket outside my classroom and elsewhere to catch water every time it rained. The heat is unreliable and air conditioning is available in only some rooms in some buildings. Despite these many needs, zero dollars were set aside for building repairs in the 2017 – 2018 school year budget. Money was not spent on reducing class sizes either. Our District has about 2,000 students and 89 teachers. Districts of comparable size have significantly more teachers. Classes from the mid-thirties to low forties are not uncommon and special education caseloads are also above the legal limit. The teachers understood that these problems would not be addressed while we were in deficit, but were outraged when they still were not addressed with budget surplus that we created. The final straw for me was the decision by the District, despite all these needs, or the sacrifices of their staff, to commit $1.4 million of our budget surplus to putting in artificial turf, a new track, and other improvements at our football stadium including two years of Wayne County Enhancement millage money. This was an insult to the students and staff. They could have fixed any problems at the stadium for a fraction of that cost and addressed all the above concerns. They chose to ignore them Then they gave the Superintendent another raise, bringing his total compensation to around $300,000 for a District with four schools. I had to leave.
On Friday, December 15, 2017 11:02 AM, Diane Ravitch’s blog wrote:
#yiv0669638026 a:hover {color:red;}#yiv0669638026 a {text-decoration:none;color:#0088cc;}#yiv0669638026 a.yiv0669638026primaryactionlink:link, #yiv0669638026 a.yiv0669638026primaryactionlink:visited {background-color:#2585B2;color:#fff;}#yiv0669638026 a.yiv0669638026primaryactionlink:hover, #yiv0669638026 a.yiv0669638026primaryactionlink:active {background-color:#11729E;color:#fff;}#yiv0669638026 WordPress.com | dianeravitch posted: “Mitchell Robinson teaches music education at Michigan State University. He read Elizabeth Green’s fawning article about Eva Zmoskowitz and her Success Academy charter chain, and he blew a gasket. He is equally mad at Green and Moskowitz for reason” | |
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“Mad as Hell”
I’m mad as hell
About the smell
The smell of “sweet Succe$$”
Cuz Eva’s school
Has stench of stool
That frankly, I detest
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Mitchell has it right.
In this article, Elizabeth Green, co-founder, CEO and editor in chief of Chalkbeat says:
“School districts, not charters, were the original architects of a system that divides students by race, class, and special needs and abilities.“ Green should know better. She probably does. This is a false statement. Redlining and other policies well beyond the control of schools created districts. The privately managed charter schools that she and Eva seem to adore are not ameliorating these conditions.
Green says: “Charter boards, designed to sidestep the unwieldy directives of democratic school governance and focus ruthlessly on leading good schools, are the main reason charter networks operate so well. “
Green is clearly on the side of the hedge fund managers that oversee what Eva does with Success Academy.
“Dip into the acknowledgments section of The Education of Eva Moskowitz and you’ll find a who’s who of energetic New York billionaires. She (Eva) reserves the most gratitude for Daniel Loeb, the hedge-fund manager who is now the chair of Success’s board. “…
“Moskowitz calls him her ‘Chief Advocacy Officer.’ Like Moskowitz, he seems completely confident that his ends more than justify his often hair-raising means. (He recently apologized for likening an African American elected official to a Ku Klux Klan member.) And as the number of schools under Success’s direction grows, so does Loeb’s power.”
Green goes on to say: “I don’t mean to suggest that Loeb and his counterparts in Denver, New Orleans, and beyond have nefarious motives. Unscrupulous school impresarios do of course exist, but they gravitate to the minority of charters that are for-profit, rather than to nonprofits like Success.”
Green’s sort-of-review of Eva’s book is really a demonstration of Green’s hostility toward public schools and democratic governance is about as intense as her praise for ruthless hedge-fund billionaires as managers of education. The silliest idea she offers is that charter schools and networks of these will somehow evolve to noble civic institutions.
It is clear that Green has no deep experience in education and even less knowledge public and charter schools. She says that charter schools are “the most promising model we have for public education.” She refuses to recognize that charter schools run by an unelected board of hedge fund managers are not public at all, and not well-served by Eva and bigots like Eva’s “Chief Advocacy Officer, Daniel Loeb.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/success-academy-charter-schools-eva-moskowitz/546554/
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More than a decade ago, Elizabeth was a real and decent journalist, but she has since used those skills to be nothing more than a paid propagandistl for the charter industry and Eva Moskowitz. The list of funders of Chalkbeat will tell you as much.
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Sorry to say that her book “How to Build a Better Teacher” (from a journalist view) was a paean to no excuses charters, whose teachers constantly leave
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Yes, though I wouldn’t have bothered to read anything by Green at that point because of her going over to the Dark Side, let alone pay to do so, I found the title alone very insulting, since it implied that teachers are the passive vehicles of policy-makers, and that mass producing temporary, script-following martinets and colonizers would make for “Better Teacher(s).”
My, admittedly few, personal encounters with her also found her to be extremely arrogant and dismissive of the opinions of teachers who didn’t have a so-called reform provenance.
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Glad this got addressed.
If you REALLY want a laugh, you should read what Elizabeth Green wrote as a side bar.
“Why my Eva Moskowitz story is the scariest one I’ve ever written”
“That’s because we published a story in partnership with the Atlantic magazine today in which I simultaneously praise and condemn Moskowitz and what she represents for our country, more sharply and honestly than I ever have before.”
It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. This is the most honest that Green has ever written about Moskowitz! And she is terrified that Moskowitz will be mad at her.
None of the rest of us are surprised that Moskowitz thought Green’s story was just dandy.
Can you imagine what puff pieces Elizabeth Green’s former Moskowitz articles were? This one was the most critical of all!
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Well said, Mr. Robinson. These are my sentiments exactly!
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